DBMS > Alibaba Cloud AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL vs. Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Memcached vs. Spark SQL

System Properties Comparison Alibaba Cloud AnalyticDB for PostgreSQL vs. Cassandra vs. Firebase Realtime Database vs. Memcached vs. Spark SQL

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

An online MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) data warehousing service based on Greenplum

Wide-column store based on ideas of BigTable and DynamoDB

Optimized for write access

Cloud-hosted realtime document store. iOS, Android, and JavaScript clients share one Realtime Database instance and automatically receive updates with the newest data.

In-memory key-value store, originally intended for caching

Spark SQL is a component on top of 'Spark Core' for structured data processing

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Vector DBMS

starting with release V5

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	0.68
Rank	#231	Overall
	#105	Relational DBMS

Score	101.89
Rank	#12	Overall
	#1	Wide column stores

Score	14.29
Rank	#39	Overall
	#6	Document stores

Score	19.42
Rank	#32	Overall
	#4	Key-value stores

Score	18.96
Rank	#33	Overall
	#20	Relational DBMS

Website

www.alibabacloud.com/product/hybriddb-postgresql

cassandra.apache.org

firebase.google.com/products/realtime-database

www.memcached.org

spark.apache.org/sql

Technical documentation

www.alibabacloud.com/help/en/analyticdb-for-postgresql/latest/product-introduction-overview

cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest

firebase.google.com/docs/database

github.com/memcached/memcached/wiki

spark.apache.org/docs/latest/sql-programming-guide.html

Developer

Alibaba / Pivotal Software Inc. / PostgreSQL Global Development Group

Apache Software Foundation

Apache top level project, originally developped by Facebook

Google

acquired by Google 2014

Danga Interactive

originally developed by Brad Fitzpatrick for LiveJournal

Apache Software Foundation

Initial release

2016

2008

2012

2003

2014

Current release

4.1.3, July 2023

1.6.25, March 2024

3.5.0 ( 2.13), September 2023

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache version 2

commercial

Open Source

BSD license

Open Source

Apache 2.0

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Astra DB: Multi-cloud DBaaS built on Apache Cassandra.

Implementation language

Java

Scala

Server operating systems

hosted

BSD
Linux
OS X
Windows

hosted

FreeBSD
Linux
OS X
Unix
Windows

Linux
OS X
Windows

Data scheme

yes

schema-free

yes

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

restricted

only equality queries, not always the best performing solution

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

SQL-like SELECT, DML and DDL statements (CQL)

SQL-like DML and DDL statements

APIs and other access methods

JDBC
ODBC

Proprietary protocol

CQL (Cassandra Query Language, an SQL-like language)
Thrift

Android
iOS
JavaScript API
RESTful HTTP API

Proprietary protocol

JDBC
ODBC

Supported programming languages

C
Java
Perl
Python
R

C#
C++
Clojure
Erlang
Go
Haskell
Java
JavaScript

Node.js
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
Scala

Java
JavaScript
Objective-C

.Net
C
C++
ColdFusion
Erlang
Java
Lisp
Lua
OCaml
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby

Java
Python
R
Scala

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

limited functionality with using 'rules'

Triggers

yes

Callbacks are triggered when data changes

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

Sharding

Implicit feature of the cloud service

Sharding

no "single point of failure"

none

yes, utilizing Spark Core

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

yes

Implicit feature of the cloud service

selectable replication factor

Representation of geographical distribution of servers is possible

none

Repcached, a Memcached patch, provides this functionallity

none

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

yes

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Eventual Consistency
Immediate Consistency

can be individually decided for each write operation

Eventual Consistency

if the client is offline
Immediate Consistency

if the client is online

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

Atomicity and isolation are supported for single operations

yes

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

User concepts

Access control

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

Access rights for users can be defined per object

yes, based on authentication and database rules

yes

using SASL (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) protocol

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Apache Cassandra is the leading NoSQL, distributed database management system, well...
» more

Competitive advantages

No single point of failure ensures 100% availability . Operational simplicity for...
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Typical application scenarios

Internet of Things (IOT), fraud detection applications, recommendation engines, product...
» more

Key customers

Apple, Netflix, Uber, ING,, Intuit,Fidelity, NY Times, Outbrain, BazaarVoice, Best...
» more

Market metrics

Cassandra is used by 40% of the Fortune 100.
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Apache licenseÂ Pricing for commercial distributions provided by DataStax and available...
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